Google considers page experience in rankings, and a slow site loses visitors before they even see your offer. Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to judge how pleasant a site is to use.
The three metrics
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — when the largest element on the first screen renders: a headline, banner or photo. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how fast the page responds to taps and clicks. Good is under 200 ms.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much the layout jumps while loading. Good is under 0.1.
How to check
- PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) — paste a page URL and look at mobile.
- Search Console → Core Web Vitals — real-visitor data across the whole site.
- Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse — for developers, with detailed hints.
What usually slows sites down
- Heavy images without compression or modern formats (WebP, AVIF).
- A hero block that appears only after an animation or scripts load.
- Dozens of third-party scripts: chats, widgets, pixels, counters.
- Fonts that load late and repaint the text.
- Images and banners without set dimensions, which make the layout jump.
What to do
- Compress images and serve WebP/AVIF sized for each screen.
- Show the headline and hero immediately, without waiting for animations.
- Load third-party scripts lazily and remove the ones you don't need.
- Preload fonts and set a fallback font.
- Set media dimensions and reserve space for banners.
- Use a CDN and caching.
Speed isn't just SEO
A fast site makes ads cheaper: a visitor you paid for doesn't leave while the page loads. That's why speeding up a site often pays back on the ad budget, before rankings even move.
We build websites and web apps on a modern stack with server rendering, image optimization, multilingual SEO and structured data from day one. Need to speed up an existing site? Describe the task in the brief.